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Brian wrote a great post about the focus on content creation in the open education movement. There were some great comments on that post - some arguing (correctly, IMO) that there isn’t enough great content available.

But even that misses the point, I fear.

Content is the least important part of education. What is far more important is what takes place between and among the students. The activities of the community of learners. What they actually DO with the content and with each other.

Great content IS important, but only if there is also a functioning and active community working together to learn, create and share. Otherwise, all that takes place is content dissemination. And that’s not education, open or otherwise.

Content Dissemination

or active community of learners

On thinking about edupunk, it strikes me that I’ve been drawn to a group of people that have embodied it for years. People that are open. That prefer to DIY. People who share, remix, mashup, and generally operate in the spirit of what is now being called edupunk. Here are my edupunk heroes, who inspire me every day (in no particular order). There are lots of other people that inspire me constantly, but when I think EDUPUNK, these are the people that really push me.

Jim Groom

Reverend Jim. The poster boy for edupunk. Jim’s been kicking out the jams on this stuff for years, running completely against the traditional establishment. He teaches courses without an LMS. He mashes up wikis and blogs. He incites radical DIYism in everyone he meets. Jim’s hardcore exploration of DIY and individual publishing have made me rethink the nature and value of enterprise systems (they still have a very important role, but not in the way I used to think they did…)

Brian Lamb

DJ Wiki. The man who lives in a realtime mashup. His work with the OLT interns is absolutely amazing. He’s taken a group of students as interns, and has essentially pushed them into the role of professional edtech developers, conference facilitators, and so much more. He provides guidance, and lets them explore. And the stuff they come up with as a team is mindboggling. Brian’s mastery of media and depth of literary knowledge are simply stunning, and only matched by his openness and willingness to share.

Jennifer Jones

Viral professional development. Jennifer has been working to help instructors at BTC to adopt pragmatic openness - starting by sharing as much of her professional development activities as possible. She set up an Elluminate play session today for several of the BTC instructors, and invited people from outside (via Twitter) to participate. As a result, we had an interesting discussion while playing and exploring a new tool. It was a casual way to safely learn a piece of technology, while modeling the power of the Network. Very cool stuff. Jen is brave, open, and able to connect people in a way I’ve never seen before.

Alan Levine

50 ways to tell a story? Serious edupunk. Inspiring hundreds (thousands?) of people literally around the world to take DIY storytelling into their own hands and craft, publish and share their own stories. Alan’s been living edupunk for as long as I’ve known him (and that goes way back to the early 90’s when he ran the Director Web community website!) Alan has always been a trailblazer, an experimenter, and a pioneer of community based collaboration.

Alec Couros

Alec’s ego is big enough. I’ll just link to my previous post on Alec.

Stephen Downes

Anarchy and individual empowerment, modeled by a person employed by the federal government of a G8 nation. Stephen’s been pushing toward personal publishing and DIY for years - long before most of his colleagues (including myself) understood where he was going. I first met him several years ago while working on the EDUSOURCE national learning object repository project. He was talking about stuff back then that we’re only now starting to see come true, most notably the use of RSS as the syndication format. Stephen is one of the few people whom I trust to see through rhetoric and hype, to break something down to the simplest components, and to see how things relate to an individual’s ability to control their own destiny. OLDaily. gRSSHopper. hardcore edupunk.

Cole Camplese

The director of an edtech unit at a huge university, who hacks WordPress themes for fun and publishes to blogs, wikis, podcasts, and various other community sites with impressive frequency and depth. Cole constantly pushes the people he works with, and the people in his Network, by encouraging people to collaborate and contribute. He’s the one who first saw the value in Twitter, when I initially dismissed it as silly and banal. He gets community in every sense of the word.

I am humbled by what these incredible people do. And am trying to figure out if and how I contribute back to the edupunk culture. I suppose 366photos is pretty edupunk (but not particularly strong on the edu- side of things). I suppose helping push Drupal, Moodle, Mediawiki, etc… on campus is a bit edupunk. And eduglu could definitely be called edupunk - but it’s still just a McGuffin, so likely doesn’t count for much at the moment.

Still, when I consider the work that these people do on a regular basis, my head spins.

The 2008/366photos project just hit the 1/4 mark. Just over 91 days in. I’ve been surprised at the number of edu-folk that decided to try the photo-a-day challenge this year. It’s fun, interesting, frustrating, challenging, and sometimes really difficult trying to come up with at least one photograph every day that doesn’t suck (or, hopefully, is interesting and/or good).

So now, we’ve got 40 people in the 366photos group. Currently there are over 1800 photos in the pool. There are likely many photos that are part of the project that aren’t included in the pool (for myself, several are marked as “friends and family” only, because they are photos of my son and/or his cousins).

That blows me away. And there are some really, REALLY good photos in there. It’s pretty cool to see people trying new things. Watching Michael play with off-camera flashes. Jen and Brian getting comfortable with their new toy. Stephen capturing winter in New Brunswick. Alan catching the cool stuff around Strawberry (and beyond). I’m not going to go through and list all 40 members but it’s been very cool watching what people come up with!

To be clear, though, this is not the only photo-a-day challenge group on Flickr. There’s a 365photos group, 366 2008, Project 365+1, 366 of 2008, and any number of other similar groups. There are probably thousands of people just on Flickr doing the project.

But what is so cool about our own little 366photos project, is that it’s composed almost entirely of edu-folks. A little community-within-a-community, of people trying something new and working (intentionally or otherwise) to improve their abilities and contribute content to the group. That’s awesome.

I worked with our Faculty of Education to build a community blogging website for use by after-degree student teachers as part of their personal/professional development, reflection, and collaboration process, as well as to collect materials for use in ePortfolios. They had a set of pretty simple constraints. Because the student teachers would be writing about activities in the K-12 classroom, and likely would be posting media (photos, videos, etc…) they needed to restrict access to the site - there could be no public access to this content. Additionally, they needed to control with a fairly fine granularity which individuals within the community would be able to see specific pieces of content. Because of these constraints, we couldn’t just load up WPMU and set them free, nor could we just point them to WordPress.com or Blogger.com. What to do…

Drupal, of course. It’s got a blogging module available out of the box (it takes a checkbox to enable it). OK. Blogging is taken care of. Members just have to click “Create content” and select “Blog post”. Easy peasey.

Want to allow members of the community to create their own groups? Organic Groups. It’s amazingly flexible, and has an added bonus, in this case, of also enabling access control to content based on group membership (after enabling Organic Groups, go to the settings page for the module and enable “Access Control”). Meaning that the student teachers could create as many private group contexts as they like, and then grant access to their content to any of their groups (and only those groups) if desired. Very powerful stuff.

OK. So now we have a bunch of student teachers blogging their brains out. That’s a lot of content to keep track of. Their professors and practicum teachers need to keep up on all of the relevant posts, and provide feedback in a timely manner. How to provide tools to let individuals track content that they’re allowed to see, that they haven’t seen yet, and that they need to respond to… Views. Drupal’s Views module is killer for this. It’s basically a database query generator, where you can provide a set of criteria to filter content, and create a display on the website. So I created a couple of handy views to help people keep up.

The first view was a simple “all content that has been posted to any of your groups, sorted in reverse chronological order” - this is the “river of news” display, which meant that members didn’t have to go hunting through their various groups (some had over a dozen group memberships) to find new content. It’s all merged, sorted, and presented to them on the front page of the site. This let members keep their fingers on the pulse of the community - they could see at a glance what was being published in all of the groups they cared about. This view also displayed the number of comments (and any new comments were flagged) so people could easily follow up on conversations.

The second view was intended to help members keep up with new content - essentially an “inbox” to be used by professors and teachers. This view was a clone of the first “river of news” view, but only displayed unread items. As a professor viewed a blog post, it would get dropped out of this view for them.

We also used the Book module to create documentation on the site (how to use the site, as well as pages with links to other resources, an FAQ, etc…) and we enabled the Forum module to create a separate non-blog discussion board within the site (but this never really got used much…)

That’s really all there is to it - Drupal just handles the rest, and once it’s configured it takes very little care and feeding.

Here’s the stuff we used (the site was built a year ago on Drupal 4.7, but I’m listing what would be used as of the current Drupal 5.3):

• Drupal 5.3
• Organic Groups module
• Views module
• LDAP Integration module (current 5.3 branch borks on UCalgary’s LDAP, so you might have to play a bit)
• Insert View module (for embedding the views on the front page)
• TinyMCE module (for a rich text editor while creating/editing content)
• Anarchy Media Player (non Drupal - add the Standalone JS version as a block in your site theme’s header and all media will be embedded automatically)

I’ll try to revise this post to clarify stuff as needed, but this is the basic recipe. The best thing to do is just start downloading and playing…

I’ve been thinking about this for some time, but haven’t taken the time to put it into words. Most recently, a post by Jennifer Jones nicely sums up why Twitter is important, and I think it goes even further than that.

Twitter is important because it makes many of the intangible human connections more readily available to people who are separated by distance. I often feel more closely integrated with the people on my Twitter stream than I do with people who work in my department. Why is that? I see those people every day. But - the people on Twitter are constantly reinforcing my connection with them, and vice versa, through the unceasing flow of status updates.

But, why is this important? I think this brings the real, visceral connections that are an essential part of a vibrant community (whether online, offline, or blended) into the forefront. I can tap into my Twitter contacts and ask questions, float ideas, or just shoot the shit. Things that are largely outside the domain of a traditional “online community” resource. The always-on nature of Twitter, and the strong sense of vibrancy and vitality, are what make it so compelling to me. At almost any time of the day or night, my Twitter stream is active, with people posting tidbits on a stunningly broad range of topics.

Sure, many of these are purely banal things like “I’m bored” or “heading out to the pub” - but those are important if only because they help reinforce a connection. I may not care that someone is going to a pub (especially if they’re in another city/country/continent and I can’t tag along), but by seeing their status update, it makes me mindful of them. I think about that person, even if briefly, and the sense of community is strengthened.

So, Twitter is valuable for so much more than simple “nanoblogging” - which is how I initially perceived it. It is important to me because it makes the sense of community and connectedness more tangible. And Twitter isn’t the only tool to help on that front.

One of the reasons I’m a raving, rabid Flickr addict is that I can follow the photos from my contacts. If they do something and post a picture, I see it. I may not have bothered to go hunting to find the picture, but the fact that Flickr streams it to me helps me keep up to date on what dozens of people are doing. I am more mindful of these people, and feel more aware and connected.

Tools like Flickr and Twitter are powerful because they are informal. It’s much quicker and easier to post a simple status update for something that wouldn’t warrant a full blog post. It’s simple to shoot a photo and hurl it up to Flickr - even if it’s not a great photo, it’s an easy way to share what’s going on in a person’s life.

One thing that newcomers to these tools often mention is how simultaneously noisy and empty they seem. Viewing the public Twitter update stream is a confusing and uninteresting activity. It’s not until you find the people that you care about - in real life - that these tools really start to get interesting. It’s not about “contact whoring” or trying to collect the most “followers” - it’s about finding the people you care about and maintaining a state of mindfulness. Something that is surprisingly easy to do with these various banality broadcasting engines.

I’m still thinking through how these tools compare with Facebook. I do know that Facebook has a decidedly different “feel” to it - with the endless flow of zombie-bites, pokes, application requests, and the like. Facebook has become annoying enough that I might check in on it once per week. I usually have Twitter and Flickr open in tabs all the time.  Facebook is evolving into a monolithic environment - the “applications” are so tightly integrated that they might as well be compiled into the kernel of FB. Small Pieces Loosely Joined is basically thrown out the window. Although I can integrate other resources, they become awkwardly sucked into FB, often providing redundant information or functionality (do I post status updates to Twitter, or to Facebook? do I post photos to Flickr or Facebook? etc…). I should be able to do these activities in one place, and one place only, and have the information pulled seamlessly together. Facebook just ain’t it.

I attended my second Calgary FlickrMeet last night. A bunch of Calgary Flickr members met downtown to hang out, shoot some photos and talk about stuff. Picture a bunch of photo geeks walking around taking a bunch of photos of everything, from every angle

It was fun to see many of my Flickr contacts in person - much like Northern Voice is great because it’s a vivification of my blogroll, FlickrMeets are fun because they are Flickr in the flesh. The event itself was organized online through Flickr. It’s a little ironic, but the main reason to go to the FlickrMeet isn’t to take photographs, but to breathe life into the online Flickr community. While a fair amount of interaction occurs online, it is face-to-face events like this that make the community “real”.

I believe this applies to online learning as well. A fully online experience lacks the “realness” that is added by face-to-face interaction. As an example, I am working through David Wiley’s Intro to Open Education course at Utah State University. He’s offering the course readings and exercises for folks to follow along online without even enrolling in the course. But in this case, it’s a completely online and impersonal experience. I happen to know several of the participants, so I definitely feel some connection, but for someone who is enrolling in the course without bringing along their own network of friends and colleagues, it would be a very abstract and distant experience. I anticipate that the Open Education 2007 conference will act as a face-to-face contextualizing event for me - I’ll finally get to meet David Wiley in person (after communicating with him online for about 7 years now), as well as a few other “classmates.”

Back to the FlickrMeet - it was a great mixture of interests and skill levels. Every level of photographer, from professional (with high end gear), to amateur (with modest gear) to newcomer (learning to use their gear). It was great to learn from the pros, while helping out the newcomers with some of the tricky things like aperture settings (why does a higher aperture number mean LESS light gets in? etc…) The cool thing is that all egos were left at home, and it felt much like a social learning party. The way education should be.

I wound up shooting 240 photos, keeping only 37 of them. I shot with three lenses, starting with a 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS, moving to a 17-35mm f/2.8 L, then to my 50mm f/1.8 prime as the light faded. Surprisingly, I had more fun with my nifty fifty, and liked the photos it took better than the much “better” and certainly more expensive lenses. Oh, and the new Canon 40D is NICE. Stupid progress. I still love my XT, though.

I’ve been forcing myself to keep thinking about (and rethinking) the concept of EduGlu - a set of tools and/or practices that would more effectively support distributed online publishing while maintaining the sense of group and community needed to make this stuff more meaningful in an educational context. I waver back and forth, between building The One True �berapp To Aggregate Them All, and a more freeform, organic, barebones directory.

I think the lightweight directory is winning. What if EduGlu was nothing more than an organic directory, where people (faculty, students, general public, etc…) are able to create folders and place links to their various locations of their own online publishing. People can create multiple groups/folders for various contexts, and add whatever relevant links they want to in each one. The directory takes care of listing the groups/folders, displaying their contents, and generating OPML containing machine-readable versions of these lists so people can then subscribe to them in their own aggregator(s). Import the OPML into Google Reader. Subscribe to it as a Reading List in BlogBridge. Import it into Bloglines, NetNewsWire, Sage, FeedOnFeeds, etc… Wherever you’re happiest. EduGlu isn’t about aggregating the ITEMS into one place, it’s about individuals sharing their content easily. Which is done more effectively as a directory, rather than an aggregator.

I installed the BlogBridge FeedLibrary application yesterday to start teasing out parts of the idea. It’s a pretty nice app (the install process could use some love, but it wasn’t hard). It runs nicely on LAMP (or MAMP in my case), and it’s free for academic use (not Open Source, but at least it doesn’t cost anything for what I need). And it absolutely rocks at doing exactly what I just described.

The idea I’m working on is that a class creates a folder, and interested individuals (prof/teacher, students, others) create subfolders for themselves. Into these subfolders, they add entries for whatever things they publish that are relevant to this class. Could be blogs, Flickr tag(s), del.icio.us tag(s), wiki changes, or anything that they do that generates RSS.�

I’ll be playing some more with it, but here’s a screenshot of an early stage of the experiment:

�

The little icons give you access to the RSS for each feed, and to the OPML containing feeds at any level of the directory you are interested in. Just want to subscribe to Dr. Speed’s feeds? Grab his OPML. Want the whole class in one shot? Grab the class OPML. Want the entire department/faculty/institution? Sure! Want to just read the items directly on the directory site? BBFL will display the RSS feeds inline, so you don’t need an aggregator of your own if you don’t want one. Want to archive the activities of a class? Subscribe an aggregator to the class OPML, and save all items that come through. There’s your academic archive.

It makes MUCH more sense to put the effort into helping make BlogBridge FeedLibrary a better tool all around, as well as for an academic context, than to build a new tool from scratch. Especially when FeedLibrary is so close to what is needed (there are some workflow issues that may need some work if unleashing it on dozens/hundreds/thousands of students, but nothing that can’t be worked out).�

I just found out via a Twitter post that Kathy Sierra, the author of the Creating Passionate Users blog, which I read religiously, has been receiving a series of threats. Cyberbullying, even death threats. Threats of violence. To the point that she had to back out of presenting a session at the ETech conference, and is canceling all public engagements.

[ED - I removed a paragraph that could be perceived as inflammatory. I wasn't trying to imply that any specific individual(s) made a death threat, only that some had been named in Kathy's post.]

This is seriously not cool. I don't have the entire story, but from Kathy's post, a group of people self-organized to inflict threats on her and a few other people online. She suggests that some of this goes with the territory. I disagree. This is not acceptable.

[ED - I removed another potentially inflammatory paragraph that didn't add to anything]

Larry Sanger announced his organization’s intention to create a “progressive fork” of Wikipedia, with a different community/moderation model. Instead of just letting everyone create and edit pages, there will be a new class of citizens called “experts” who get final say. The rest of us are demoted to “unwashed masses”.

From Larry Sanger’s essay “Toward a New Compendium of Knowledge“:

According to one source, there are over one billion (a thousand million) people on the Internet. That means there must be tens of millions of intellectuals online–I mean educated, thinking people who read about science or ideas regularly. Tens of millions of intellectuals can work together, if they so choose.

This was taken right from the first paragaph. The “one source” isn’t mentioned, so it’s not verifiable. He could be pulling this stat out of thin air. Even Wikipedia wouldn’t allow this.

So, by his math, the Citizendium is a project for the top 1-10% of the online population. Definitely not open to everyone - the contributions of the other “uneducated, unthinking” 900 million people aren’t wanted. To me, this just smacks of authoritarianism - a compendium of knowledge by oligarchy. Which is cool, if you’re one of the oligarchs. But a little oppressive for everyone else.

I’ve got a problem with the approach. Sure, Wikipedia isn’t perfect. But it’s open. If you don’t like how something works, there is an existing (and vibrant) community in place. Working within the existing frameworks to create a better Wikipedia would be far better than splitting the tribe and moving to a new camp.

My problems with Citizendium are:

1. Who defines “expert”? What is “expert” to one person/group may not be to another. This is a somewhat arbitrary definition - if not arbitrary, then at least relative. Case in point - Stephen Downes being flagged as “unremarkable” in Wikipedia. What would the process be like to have that rectified if only “experts” are the gatekeepers of our shared knowledge?
2. Forking the Wikipedia (and the community). Instead of everyone just working on the One True Wikipedia, you’ll have to choose. You’re either with us or against us.
3. Downplaying the importance of the “wild west” Wikipedia. The major reason Wikipedia has been as successful and relevant as it has been, is directly due to the fact that anyone can edit anything. No approval required. No login required.
4. Implied authoritarian structure. Experts. Moderators. Approval processes. Anti-Wikipedian measures. The power of these tools is that they put the power into the hands of the people. All of the people. No exceptions. No preferrential treatment.

I know I’ll be sticking with Wikipedia (and the other various Wikimedia ventures) because of their openness. I really wish/hope that the effort being expended on the new Citizendium project would be redirected into the Wikipedia, rather than against it.

Update: Of course. Clay Shirky says it better.

Stephen Downes posted a link to a Salon article on Community-based economy.

It strikes me that moving away from a market-driven economy (in whatever form that may take) would solve or at least alleviate many of the things that bug me about Modern Life. The omnipresent advertising. The insane bubble-and-burst stock market. TV being so dumbed down as to make the vast majority of it useless, or IQ-decreasing, or worse. The need to “monetize” everything. The resistance to making difficult yet necessary decisions (like, say, avoiding the Peak Oil crisis, for example).

How about a bottom-up, open-source-modelled community-based economy? It’s sure piqued my interest… Now, how to move large portions of North America toward that model?

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